Thursday, 29 September 2011

Crysis 2 Guest Review

This guest review was written by Dan Jones.

Crysis 2 has a good start. It’s been born into the Cry legacy, and it’s also extremely hard to run on the PC but this is the Xbox 360 review so that’s not a problem. When I say Cry legacy I mean that it’s the sequel to Crysis made by Crytek on the CryEngine 3. See?

Anyway, Crysis 2 takes place in New York. Except that it’s now been infected by a disease which kills people. There’s probably more background to the virus but unfortunately I’ve never played Crysis 1. Boohoo. The US Army is apparently doing something else because the US Government has put martial law on New York under supervision of a corporation called CryNet. Well done Crysis, you’ve got Cry in again. Anyway they have an alarmingly large security force called C.E.L.L, who have tanks and gunships. You play as Alcatraz, a US Navy SEAL with no personality at all. Anyway, Alcatraz gets very nearly killed by a random group of aliens, but is saved by Prophet a guy in the all-powerful Cry Suit. Seriously? Anyway, the game follows Alcatraz in the all-powerful death suit on his journey to not get killed by a group of mentally deficient mercenaries. You can upgrade one of three power trees, Cloak, Armour and Weapon. The upgrade system is annoying with Alcatraz twitching his fingers for whichever one you want to upgrade, which makes it a bit fidgety.

I played the game as an overdressed ninja, sneaking around the enemies and imagining their boss shouting at them when I get to the blow up a helicopter ten miles past a checkpoint set up to kill me. There’s also a flaw in the core of the stealth gameplay, when you get spotted and are surrounded by enemies the game should rip you to shreds and send you back to the last save. But at some points you get spotted and you are so overpowered you can just rip through them anyway. Without the stealth elements Crysis 2 is just another shooty shooty bang bang FPS just where you can jump like you’ve got a pogo stick lodged in your rear end and can buff yourself up with armour. This sort of brings to Crysis’ biggest problem. The balancing issues. The difficulty curve is like a rollercoaster where the end is one of the easiest points in the game. If you have an action game where the action doesn’t escalate properly then there’s something wrong.

Crysis 2 isn’t a bad game. It’s not brilliant. It’s mediocre, but one thing everybody says about Crysis 2 is that it has brilliant graphics. And honestly they are the best graphics I’ve ever seen in any game. Ever. I recommend Crysis 2, but it has lots of problems. It’s fun, the story isn’t very good and the characters aren’t likeable. But this is worth the money.